Leigh Brasington's Recommended Firefox Extensions

    Notes:

  1. Ad Block   Hey Mr. Ad Guy, you want me to see your ad? Then it better not be big, flashy, obnoxious or any of that; else I'll disappear it with Ad Block.

  2. Back IS Close   I love this one. Those stupid web designers who insist on opening a new window when I click a link no longer irritate me - because the Back button closes the window, leaving me right back where I was when I clicked - just like it's supposed to be.

  3. Download Statusbar   I like this much better than the default Download Manager.

  4. Googlebar Lite   Replace the so so Search toolbar with a smarter Google toolbar.

  5. IE View Lite   I set this extension to my ViewWith program which gives me a choice of other programs - not just Internet Explorer (yes, the are some web sites that only work in IE - e.g. Microsoft). ViewWith and this extension give me the ability to use IE, Mozilla, Window Media Player, RealPlayer, or Quicktime to view a link.

  6. Menu Editor   If you have lots of history entries because you set your history for several months, you will find that opening the Go menu item causes Firefox to seem to hang. It will eventually "unhang", but a better solution is to disappear the Go menu entirely. Menu Editor easily lets you do this.

  7. NoScript   This one really enhances the security of Firefox (which out of the box is much more secure than IE). You get to say which sites you trust to run Javascript and Java - all others are blocked. But you can unblock with 2 mouse clicks - strongly recommended. Note: To unblock a site like http://home.alamedanet.net, you need to unblock http://home.alamedanet.net rather than alamedanet.net - some weird bug there.

  8. Sage RSS Reader   Adds RSS Reader functionality to Firefox. Nice, if you are into RSS.

  9. TargetAlert   Gives you little icons to indicate what kind of link you are about to click (movie, new window, PDF, etc.).

  10. ViewSourceWith   I press Ctrl+U and the source for the current web page appears in my favorite editor. Also, since I use UDP as that editor, I can immediately email the page - click here to see how.

  11. Web Developer   Adds a toolbar for Web site authors. But it also gives you control over things like turning off and on Referer Logging and Java. Another recommended extension for Web developers is Firebug which can be very helpful when debugging javascript.

About Firefox Extensions

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while keeping Firefox small to download.

In general, they work well - but there are incompatibilities occasionally. The set I list above are all compatible with each other, so you don't have to worry about this particular set of extensions.

Extensions have to be updated to work with new versions of Firefox. Sometimes a favorite extension may lag behind Firefox itself. If you have programming skills, you can sometimes update an extension yourself to enable it work with a newer version of Firefox - for instructions, see Making extensions work in Firefox 1.5. By following these instructions, I was easily able to make Back IS Close version 1.0 work with Firefox version 1.5. Of course, this is no longer necessary with Back IS Close because the author has updated it (version 1.3) to work with Firefox version 1.5.

Back to Better Surfing
Back to Leigh's Home Page Site Map                   Site Search

This page hosted by
Leigh Brasington / / Revised 25 Dec 07